The lost quality that’s musical coherence
By Roy Gregory
Flirting with the edge of the performance envelope is exciting in itself. But it also generates learning opportunities and teaches (occasionally harsh) lessons. Having what are arguably the two best available digital sources in house at the same time as the Divin Monarques, a step-change in performance from Göbel High-End, has done both. Although the system is completely unaffordable for all but the lucky few, the lessons to be learnt from it apply across the board, irrespective of price. You may never own a multi-box Wadax, or a pair of Göbel speakers big enough to sleep in (if it wasn’t for those pesky braces and separate enclosed volumes), but you can still reap the rewards of their performance.
Throughout what has been an exacting process, with a lot of fine tuning to go with the considerable heavy lifting, a single recurring theme has emerged – consistency, leading to coherence, both sonic and musical. It’s an experience that has reinforced the importance of adopting a system-wide strategy and approach, but it has also served to offer a stark reminder that the musical coherence we once took for granted, is now something that is increasingly rare and needs to be sought – assiduously! The bigger and more complex systems become, the harder it is to provide consistency in their mechanical and electrical interfaces: more boxes and more moving parts means a greater chance of discontinuities. More importantly, the lessons of this cost no object odyssey apply to all systems, irrespective of price and ambition. It just makes the musical impact of those lessons more emphatic and obvious. But what lies behind them, how do you apply them at more approachable price levels and what are their wider implications?
As different as they are, the Wadax Reference Transport/DAC and the CH Precision D10/Conductor/C10 have one thing in common (apart from their stratospheric price), something that separates them from all other current digital sources: the degree to which they have managed to achieve temporal, spatial and dynamic coherence. That coherence is a perennial weakness in digital replay, undermining the musical performance of affordable disc players and, especially, streaming solutions. It’s also prevalent in large loudspeaker systems, to the extent that the larger the speaker, the more likely the affliction and the more obvious it is. Truly coherent, full-range speaker systems are few and far between. What has made the results from the current Wadax/CH/Göbel project so impressive – and they are, seriously impressive – is the simultaneous advances in musical coherence represented at both ends of the system. Underpinned by a rigorous approach to infrastructural consistency, embracing everything from the AC supply to signal transfer, system grounding and physical support to noise reduction, the results have been exceptional, as witnessed by the many visitors and reporters who’ve experienced them. Can we benefit by applying a similar approach and expectations at more affordable price levels? If we can, how does that affect our approach to and the shape of such systems? Those are questions worth answering, both on an individual, personal level and for the longevity of the wider audio industry.
